Within the gold-tinged choirbooks of fifteenth-century Europe, a bawdy song about genitalia is perhaps the last thing one might expect to find. Yet L’ami Baudichon (“the friend Baudichon”), whose text leaves little to the imagination, shows up as the basis for an early mass by Josquin des Prez. The song’s presence in sacred polyphony has long puzzled musicologists. Whatever the song is doing in Josquin’s mass, it also appears in other contexts: combinative songs, theater pieces, poetry, and literature. This paper examines the song’s varied uses in early French theater, focusing on its appearances in a morality play about blasphemy and a ribald farce.

This paper examines the song’s varied uses in early French theater, focusing on its appearances in a morality play about blasphemy and a ribald farce. In “Les Blasphemateurs,” L’ami Baudichon appears alongside other popular tunes in a scene of transgressive revelry, while in “Le Farce des Enfants de Borgneux,” it functions as a euphemistic reference to sexual activity. These theatrical appearances provide valuable context for understanding how popular songs functioned in late-medieval culture, particularly during a period when they began to play an increasingly important role in polyphonic compositions. Turning a spotlight on the non-musical sources for these tunes offers new perspectives on the relationship between popular song, theatrical performance, and transgressive speech in late-medieval France.

Emily Zazulia is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Where Sight Meets Sound: The Poetics of Late-Medieval Music Writing (Oxford University Press, 2021), which received the Early Music Award from the American Musicological Society and the Emerging Scholar Book Award from the Society for Music Theory. She has received other awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Medieval Academy of America, the Renaissance Society of America, the American Musicological Society, Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti, and the Hellman Foundation. Her current projects include a monograph on popular song and ideas of the secular, a co-edited volume provisionally titled Josquin: A New Approach, and a digital humanities project on mapping the musical Renaissance.